As much a trifle as its title suggests, "My Blueberry Nights" sees Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar Wai applying his characteristic visual and thematic doodles to a wispy story of lovelorn Yanks. With pop music sensation Norah Jones floating through the episodic tale as a blank-page heroine striving to overcome the blues, beautifully embroidered pic generates increased interest as it travels from East to West and encounters Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman along the way, but its ambition and accomplishment remain modest in the extreme.

Working from a script he wrote with Lawrence Block, Wong and his crew maintain a dreamlike atmosphere throughout the woman's journey. Much of this film was made in the editing room and lab as Wong manipulates time, space and colors to render these melancholy tales into fleeting memories culled from a vague past. Did this really happen or was it a dream? A character wonders.

It doesn't seem to matter much to Wong. Even the way ice cream melts into blueberry pie in extreme close-up captures, he seems to feel, an emotion felt, forgotten, then re-remembered.

The glue here is Jones, who holds a wispy, wistful film together with a deeply felt, unself-conscious performance that strikes the right notes without ever falling into repetition or banality. She brings her singer's talent of knowing when to go for emotions and when to hold back to her acting. It's a remarkably assured work; one hopes she will further explore acting in other movies.

But then My Blueberry Nights is full of such false notes, such lost-in-translation moments that might conceivably have worked in a Hong Kong setting but fall flat on the road to California. True to form, Wong's curtain raiser is beautiful to look at and unabashedly romantic. But it is also vapid and ephemeral, trading in a kind of karaoke Americana that bounces us from cafe to bar to truck stop for the simple reason that they are there to be bounced between. Taking off for Vegas, our heroine reflects that "what should have taken hours went on for days and what should have been a short ride became a long one". She might have been talking about the whole of My Blueberry Nights.

Neither exciting nor disappointing, "My Blueberry Nights" is sharply uneven: The yarn has a decent beginning and a weak second reel, but then it improves considerably, ending on an emotionally satisfying, if also too predictable and symmetrical manner.

Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days" is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc. Showcasing all the elements of new Romanian cinema -- long takes, controlled camera and an astonishing ear for natural dialogue -- Cristian Mungiu's masterly film plays only one false note in an otherwise beautifully textured story.

Set in the shabby rooms of rundown buildings on neglected city streets, the film casts an unblinking eye on life in the last years of communism in Romania. Its story of desperation forced on two hapless youngsters indicts a regime that was as callous as it was empty. The film is dark, gloomy and without music, but it is also observant and highly suspenseful, with Mungiu using his often static camera to balance banal cruelty with simple generosity. The film, which boasts an exceptional performance by Anamaria Marinca, may not break out of the festival and art house circuit, but it is likely to pick up some awards along the way.

Emotionally, the movie demands an actress of toughness, verge and resiliency. Marinca gives an astonishing performance, tough, fearless and open.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is not an easy work--it's terrifying, gripping, and devastating. Never punishing or too cruel to experience, the movie considers a wholly different moral and emotional demand, and it quite unflinchingly draws out the limitations, randomness, and cruelty of modern life.